Handle With Care
by rebeldivaluv
Summary: Chloe is not grieving. Broe. Plot speculation and character death.


**Title:** Handle With Care  
**Fandom:** Days of Our Lives  
**Pairing:** Brady/Chloe, but the love quadrangle from hell along the way  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Summary:** Repression is what Chloe does best.  
**Author's Notes:** So I haven't written Days fic since shortly after Nadia left the first time, and I haven't watched Days since Nadia and Kyle left the last time, but I sadly had to stumble across the spoiler that Chloe's coming back to Days—without Brady. And as Broe are my penultimate OTP, the only ones who ever got a happy ending, this has been the cause of much distress for me. Thus, ficcage. Angsty, depressing ficage with some spoilers and speculation for future Days plotlines.

Handle With Care

"Karma's a bitch," she says with a careless shrug of her shoulders whenever someone tries to extend their sympathy for her loss.

No one ever tries a second time.

She doesn't mourn, doesn't wear black unless it happens to be an extremely sexy outfit. She takes off her wedding ring the night after the funeral, throws it in a box with everything else he ever gave her. Then she makes boxes for everything that reminds her of him, tapes them all tightly shut, and ships them off to storage.

She grabs everything she has left—it all fits in one suitcase—and boards the next flight to Salem.

* * *

Belle sobs for hours when she breaks the news. She waited to do it face-to-face—_so much_ _kinder,_ she thinks, as she pictures his face after the phone call that told him his father was dead, but picturing his face is not something she allows herself anymore, so she tapes the memory tightly shut and ships it off to storage—but now she has to deal with the fallout.

She comforts the grieving (_Tinker_)Belle. Her own eyes remain dry as desert sand.

Belle accuses her of being heartless.

"You're not," he says from the corner.

She ignores him. Only crazy women talk to their dead husbands.

* * *

She's heard the saga of Belle, Shawn and Philip from all three sides. Each of them sees her as an ally; she sees them all as fools. She was a fool once (rather be with the boy who called her _slut _and _whore _and_lying bitch_ than the best friend who'd protect her from anything), but she has no patience with folly now.

She would like to tell them all to shut up about their stupid melodrama, that none to them has the slightest clue what love is, but love is in storage (_in a plot of earth, six feet deep_), so she simply says, "I'm sorry."

* * *

"It's so wonderful to have you back!" they all say. And "How are you doing?" in tones of pity.

"Fine," she says with a lift of her chin. "It gets a little easier each day."

They all believe her, because none them truly knows her, and that's the reason she came back to Salem in the first place.

Philip smiles at her and puts his arm around her shoulders, and she is so glad (_miserable, really, but everything is upside down since the day his car and her world flipped over_) that he has never known how to see inside her.

To him, to the world, she is inscrutable.

"I know you; I see you," he says.

She turns away, because delusions can't see you when you're not looking back.

* * *

When she had her car accident and let him think she was dead (_"Karma's a bitch," she says with a careless shrug of her shoulders_), he slept with someone else, imagining it was her.

When she sleeps with Philip, it is because she can never imagine Philip is him. She keeps her eyes wide open, lest she be tempted to forget, and in the whisper of her name (_slut, whore, lying bitch) _on Philip's lips, she hears only the echo of a dead dream, of a person who never existed.

She leaves before the afterglow, because sex is one thing, but she's never rested in anyone's arms but his, and Philip doesn't need to know the pill cocktail and vodka chaser that ensures her dreamless oblivion for one more day.

"I still love you," he says as he walks home beside her.

She doesn't say anything, because she's still sane enough to know he's not really there.

* * *

Belle sees her as a rival now, and she wishes she regretted the lost (_sister_)friend, but she cannot bring herself to care. Belle is different, and she is different, and the girls they once were have been packed away in boxes marked _Fragile—Handle With Care._

Philip's obsession with Belle had been going on so long Belle has almost forgotten she is second choice for him, as much as he is for her.

"Don't worry," she tells Belle, "it's not love."

"Of course not," Belle snipes. "You're not capable of that."

He sits between them at their table and shakes his head at his sister.

"You're right, I'm not," she lies and runs out of the café.

* * *

She's with Shawn now, and Belle's with Philip, and all it means is a different bed she's slipping out of in the late hours of the night.

She washes before making her escape, and her eyes catch her reflection in Shawn's bathroom mirror. She is struck by the cold, distant beauty of the face (_Portrait of a Lady_) and wonders that her appearance should be so little changed.

"You'll always be beautiful to me," he says (and he's said it before, when she had jagged scars running down her face, but she wasn't as twisted and ugly then as she is now).

She pounds the glass with her fist, and when Shawn comes running, he finds her sobbing or laughing (_she is never sure which is which anymore_) alone on the floor in the midst of a hundred broken reflections.

* * *

"Sing for me," Shawn says and means, _Let me in_.

"I don't sing anymore."

Shawn smiles sadly (he's the first to finally get it, and of course that makes sense—he was her first friend, only she'd forgotten that when she shipped off all her memories) as he says, "Where's your wedding ring, Chloe?"

She shrugs. "I lost it."

"You should find it. Any man who sees you should be given fair warning. You're already taken."

Shawn leaves, but she's not alone.

"Sing for me," he says softly, and she wants to so badly she forgets for a moment he's not here. But the first note chokes in a voice hoarse from months without practice, and she remembers.

* * *

The house is dusty after years of disuse. White sheets on all the furniture; boxes litter the floor. All her memories packed away on the very outskirts of town. She hadn't had anyplace else to send them, and she hadn't planned to come here again anyway.

But it doesn't surprise her that entering Isabella's cottage feels like coming home after a long, exhausting journey. She opens box after box until the very air smells like him. She takes Shawn's advice and finds her (_with this_) ring (_I thee wed_), slips it on, and kisses it fervently, a pilgrim unearthing a holy relic.

"Miss you, too, Chloe."

"Brady," she breathes and enters the empty room where he awaits.

_**fin**_


End file.
